Science & Society, Vol. 76, No.

3, July 2012, 365–392

Cognitive Commodities and the Value-Form

GUIDO STAROSTA
ABSTRACT: One of the central claims of the “post-workerist” Cog-
nitive Capitalism approach is that the specific ontology of cognitive
commodities (costless reproducibility, indivisibility, non-rivalry,
etc.) contributes to the obsolescence of the Marxian “law of value”
in contemporary capitalism. Although that claim is usually pre-
sented as grounded on self-evident and unproblematic facts and
implications of the nature of cognitive commodities, those argu-
ments about the crisis of the “measure of value in social labor-time”
rest on a rather crude understanding of the antithetical deter-
minations of the commodity-form as the unity of use-value and
(exchange-)value. While acknowledging the descriptive validity of
some of the features associated with so-called cognitive commodi-
ties, a more rigorous approach to the critique of political economy
can make sense of those peculiarities through the lenses of the
qualitative and quantitative determinations of the value-form that
Marx presented in Capital, i.e., through the law of value.

T
HE “COGNITIVE CAPITALISM” APPROACH is the latest theo-
retical development of the post-workerist current associated
with the French journal Multitudes (including, among its major
figures, Yann Moulier-Boutang, Carlo Vercellone, Antonella Corsani
and Bernard Paulré).1 It emerged as an attempt to systematize the
previously advanced (and better known) “immaterial labor” thesis into
a coherent and unified research program (Dieuaide, et al., 2006).2

1 For overviews of the main tenets of the approach, see especially Corsani, et al., 2001; Vercel-
lone, 2004b; Paulré, 2007; and Moulier-Boutang, 2007. There are few English translations
of this recent work by post-workerists. See, however, Vercellone, 2005; 2007.
2 The “immaterial labor” thesis is a central element of Empire (Hardt and Negri, 2000) and
Multitude (Hardt and Negri, 2004), two highly influential books by leading post-workerist
authors.

365
366 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

The main thrust of the argument remains the same: the essence of
the recent transformations of capitalism can be found in the novel
forms of productive subjectivity in the era of the “general intellect”
and the emancipatory content that they embody (Vercellone, 2007,
35). The current phase of capitalist development is thus seen as the
realization of the qualitative determinations of productive subjectivity
that Marx described in the so-called “Fragment on Machines” in the
Grundrisse (Vercellone, 2007, 26ff). On the one hand, “living knowl-
edge” or the cognitive dimension of living labor becomes the principal
force of production (Vercellone, 2007, 19, 29) and, therefore, the
qualitatively dominant source of value creation and accumulation
(Negri and Vercellone, 2008; Vercellone, 2008a). This represents a
new stage in the antagonistic development of the capitalistic division
of labor, which sublates the Smithian logic of separation between
mental and manual labor (or conception and execution) that domi-
nated “industrial capitalism” and the real subsumption of labor to
capital. On the other hand, this new figure of the collective laborer
(“a diffuse intellectuality”) thereby embodies the material capacity
to organize productive cooperation autonomously from capital, thus
rendering superfluous the role of capitalist command (Vercellone,
2008b, 4). These two aspects of contemporary capitalism entail both
the obsolescence of the law of value and the immediate material pos-
sibility of a direct transition to communism (Vercellone, 2007, 35).
These contentious claims have already been critiqued quite force-
fully by a number of authors from diverse traditions and perspectives
(Caffentzis, 2005; Camfield, 2007; Henninger, 2007; Smith, 2008),
so my discussion will be focused elsewhere. Instead, this article con-
centrates mainly on a second constitutive element of the Cognitive
Capitalism approach, namely its emphasis on the peculiar nature of
the products of this allegedly novel hegemonic form of labor, that is,
the specificity of so-called cognitive commodities. These are commodities
for which the knowledge mobilized and objectified in their produc-
tion predominates over the direct manufacturing labor required for
the actual fabrication of its material support, which will act as “car-
rier” of that predominantly “ideal” content constituting their use-
value (Vercellone, 2007, 29). This feature of cognitive commodities
results in a peculiar cost structure: the production of the first article
generally entails enormously high initial fixed costs in the form of
massive R&D investments, whereas the cost of “reproduction” (i.e.,
 cognitive commodities 367

the “marginal cost”) of subsequent units pales into insignificance or

even approaches zero (Vercellone, 2004a, 69). The emblematic case,
which is one of the main focal points of discussions within the Cogni-
tive Capitalism literature and which we address in more detail below,
is that of software (Blondeau, 2004). In a now seminal paper in the
mainstream economics literature on the subject, Arthur (1996, 103)
reports that the first Microsoft Windows disc was produced at a cost
of $50 million, in contrast with the negligible $3/unit production
cost of subsequent copies.3
This argument about the implications of the increasing hege-
mony of cognitive commodities for capitalist development of the
productive forces is also a central aspect of this paradigm, but one
that has remained relatively unexplored in the critical literature (for
brief exceptions, see Carchedi, 2005; Husson, 2007). As much as the
mutations in the labor that produces them, this transformation of
products into “cognitive commodities” is seen by this approach as
pushing the Marxian “law of value” further into the dustbin of his-
tory.4 In effect, the argument goes, the specific material “ontology”
(Zuckerfeld, 2006) of these knowledge-intensive, “immaterial” prod-
ucts of labour (involving their costless reproducibility, indivisibility,
non-rivalry, non-excludability, etc.), clashes with the nature of value
as “objectified social labor-time.” The value-form is therefore forced
upon use-values, through the “parasitical” imposition of “artificial
scarcity” by means of juridical forms such as intellectual property
rights (Moulier-Boutang, 2004b).
The material nature of cognitive commodities is, in this approach,
conceived as one of the two pillars of the contemporary structural
crisis of the “law of value.” Inasmuch as the law of value makes the
market (hence, scarcity) the key criterion for the production of use-
values, its rationality as a progressive social relation loses all historical
foundation in the face of the “logic of abundance” characterizing
the cognitive components of social wealth (Vercellone, 2009, 69).
The second pillar is the aforementioned hegemony of the cognitive

3 Another paradigmatic example is that of pharmaceutical commodities, especially as a product

of the so-called “biotechnological revolution.” But the case of software has additional appeal
to cognitive capitalism theorists because of the political ramifications associated with the
free software movement. I offer some reflections on this below.
4 By the “law of value,” I mean the organization of the unity of social labor through the quali-
tative and quantitative determinations of the value-form of its product. In other words, it is
the active principle regulating the movement of material reproduction of social life.
368 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

dimension of living labor as the dominant force of production, espe-

cially given the alleged growing importance of “living” knowledge
vis-à-vis that which is embodied in fixed capital (Moulier-Boutang,
2007, 58–9, 144–7). In this second sense, the crisis of the law of value
reflects its exhaustion as a form of capitalist rationalization (that is,
as a form of control of workers and of increasing social productivity),
which is seen as necessarily predicated on the imposition of abstract
labor measured in units of simple labor time (Vercellone, 2009, 69).5
With the cognitive dimension of the organization of production now
reunited with living labor, the objective basis for capitalist command
and its appropriation of value also disappears (Vercellone, 2009, 69).
In brief, both the market and capitalist command become parasitic as
social relations, and the capitalist mode of production in its current
cognitive stage reaches its absolute limit as a form of development of
the productive forces (Vercellone, 2009, 68).
This paper subjects to critical scrutiny such claims about the impact
of the growing hegemony of cognitive commodities on the fundamental
“laws of motion” of capitalist society. It argues that the claims about the
crisis of the “measure of value in social labor-time” rest on a rather crude
understanding of the antithetical determinations of the commodity-
form as the unity of use-value and (exchange-)value. While acknowl-
edging the descriptive validity of some of the features associated with
so-called cognitive commodities, the paper shows that a more rigorous
approach to the critique of political economy can make sense of such
commodities through the lenses of the qualitative and quantitative
determinations of the value-form that Marx presented in Capital. The
paper thus provides further arguments against the thesis that we are
living in an age of crisis of the “law of value” as the dynamic principle
presiding over the contradictory movement of contemporary capitalism.
The need for this critical engagement with the Cognitive Capital-
ism approach is eminently political. Although these post-workerist
scholars are usually at pains to distance themselves from apologetic
approaches to the “new economy” based on centrality of information
and communication technologies (ICT) (Corsani, et al., 2001, 11ff.;
Moulier-Boutang, 2007, 67–80; Vercellone, 2004b, 5–8), I think that
they remain too uncritical of many of the mainstream claims about
5 This kind of formulation reveals that, despite protestations to the contrary (Moulier-Boutang,
2007, 57–8), post-workerist authors do tend to conflate deskilled concrete labor and abstract
labor.
 cognitive commodities 369

the so-called “knowledge economy.” This not only leads them to draw
theoretical conclusions about the relevance of Marx’s value theory
too hastily, but also leads them to flawed political implications. In sim-
ply offering a radical reformulation of fundamentally unchallenged
ideological accounts of the role of knowledge in the contemporary
economy, they overstate the immediate emancipatory potentialities of
the present phase of capitalism and downplay the profundity of the
material transformations of productive subjectivity still needed before
“the capitalist integument” can be “burst asunder” (Marx, 1976a, 929).

The Specific Material “Ontology” of Cognitive Commodities and the

Simpler Determinations of the Value-Form

A central argument put forward by Cognitive Capitalism theo-

rists is that cognitive commodities differ significantly from “physical”
ones due to the peculiar cost structure entailed by their knowledge-
intensity: there are extremely high costs of production involved in
the first unit, while the costs of reproduction are minimal and come
down to the reproduction of the materiality of the support in which
the previously deployed knowledge will be incorporated (Ordoñez,
et al., 2008, 43) — a compact disc, for example. This costless repro-
ducibility of cognitive commodities thereby makes the “law of value
founded on the measure of abstract labor-time immediately dedicated
to production enter into crisis” (Vercellone, 2007, 29). This sounds
deceptively simple and intuitive. If the primacy of exchange-value over
real wealth is predicated on scarcity (marginalism) or on the “diffi-
culties of production” (classical political economy and, in Cognitive
Capitalism’s interpretation, Marx as well), then it seems reasonable
to conclude that the immanent determinations of the value-form
cannot regulate the production of commodities for which “the time
of labor directly dedicated to production . . . becomes insignificant”
(Vercellone, 2007, 33). Presumably relying on this apparent simplicity,
Cognitive Capitalism theorists hardly make any effort to actually flesh
out and substantiate their arguments (Henninger, 2007, 172). Yet the
argument rests on a fundamental confusion over the immanent deter-
minations of the value-form of the product of labor. More specifically,
this line of reasoning stops short at the appearance presented by the
determination of value when the commodity is considered abstractly,
as the premise of capitalist production (Marx, 1976b, 953ff).
370 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

On this simpler level of abstraction, the commodity does indeed

appear, and could therefore be legitimately treated, as an “autono-
mous article” or “independent object,” a single product whose value
is determined “in isolation” by the specific quantum of socially nec-
essary labor objectified in it (Marx, 1976b, 953). However, the prac-
tical critique of capital cannot rest content with being “right as far
as appearances go” (Marx, 1976b, 972). And in fact, this appearance
vanishes as soon as we consider commodities as what they really are,
that is, not simply the abstract element or “economic cell-form” of
capitalist production but as its direct result. For we shall see that the
determinations of value are then revealed to pertain not to the isolated
individual commodity as such, but to the total mass of commodities
of which each singular article is not just materially, but also formally,
posited as an aliquot part. The notion of value as an abstractly indi-
vidual attribute of the isolated commodity, on which the thesis of the
incompatibility between cognitive commodities and the value-form
necessarily depends, will be shown to rest on shaky foundations.
Thus we need to examine the form-determinations that give unity
to the organic relation between the value of the individual article and
that of the broader total product of which it is part. There are two main
scales to consider in this regard. First, the “partial” organic relation
between the individual articles comprising the mass of commodities
resulting from each privately organized process of production. Second,
there is the broader relation between that partial mass and the total
volume of commodities of that kind that is brought to the market by
competing private producers. This pertains to the establishment of
the qualitative and quantitative articulation of social production and
consumption within a branch of the social division of labor as a whole.
Marx considers this only in passing when presenting the metamor-
phosis of the commodity in Chapter 3 of Volume I of Capital (Marx,
1976a, 202­3); it fully unfolds when he considers the overall unity of
the movement of social capital as mediated by the establishment of a
single market value out of the diverse individual values of each pro-
ducer within each sphere (Marx, 1991, 281ff).6 For the purpose of
this discussion, the examination of the first aspect is of more direct
relevance to demonstrate that the alleged contradiction between the
6 When exploring the circulation of commodities, Marx explicitly poses the question of the
actual unity of the movement of social labor as a whole for the first time in his exposition.
He thus mentions in passing those aspects of the determination of value (Marx, 1976a, 202).
 cognitive commodities 371

peculiar material nature of cognitive commodities and the simpler

determinations of the value-form is only apparent.
Marx starts his dialectical investigation with the commodity as
the elementary form of the “immense collection of commodities”
in which social wealth appears in the capitalist mode of production
(Marx, 1976a, 125). He takes the individual commodity “in his own
hand” and analyses “the formal determinants that it contains as a
commodity and which stamp it as a commodity” (Marx, 1976b, 1059).
This analysis shows that what is specific in the commodity is that, as a
product of labor, it not only possesses a use-value but is also the bearer
of a second, historically specific objective attribute: the form of general
exchangeability or the value-form. The subsequent analysis reveals that
the commodity is the product of the “labor of private individuals who
work independently of each other” (Marx, 1976a, 165), this being the
reason why the organization of the division of labor must necessarily
be mediated in this reified form or, to put it another way, why com-
modity-producing labor is essentially value-producing. Although the
different private labors are materially dependent upon one another
as part of the “primordial system of the division of labor,” their irre-
ducibly social character is not immediately manifested when they are
actually performed in the direct process of production. Hence, this
necessary social articulation of private labors is realized indirectly,
through the mediation of the exchange of the products of private
labor as commodities. Only at that moment is it revealed whether the
portion of social labor which each producer personifies was expended
in a socially useful fashion. This is the reason why the objectification
of the abstract character of the privately performed social labor is
specifically represented as an objective attribute of its products, i.e.,
value. The magnitude of value is determined by the socially necessary
labor-time required for the production of commodities. This means
that the objectification of the abstract character of private labor is
socially represented in the form of value only inasmuch as it satisfies
two conditions: first, it corresponds to the technologically normal
conditions of production prevailing in society (Marx, 1976a, 129),
and, second, it can satisfy a social need (Marx, 1976a, 31), regardless
of whether these needs arise from “the stomach or the imagination”
(Marx, 1976a, 125).
When analysing the individual commodity as such, each of them
is considered by Marx as “an average sample of its kind” (Marx, 1976a,
372 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

129–30). This means that at this level of abstraction the diversity of

individual circumstances can be ignored, and that the organic rela-
tion between the determination of value of each singular commodity
and that of the mass of which it is part can be momentarily left aside.
The individual “part” can be considered apart from its relationship
with the broader “whole,” for the time being, and therefore each
commodity is analysed at this stage in isolation, as an autonomous
individual product. The relation of the individual product with the
mass of which it is part does exist but, as it were, only extrinsically,
through the determination of the individual commodity as an “aver-
age representative.” This also implies that the divergence between
the labor expended on any single commodity and any other is, at this
stage, immaterial. And this obviously includes the relation between the
“first” cognitive article produced and the reproduction of subsequent
identical items of its kind.
But matters are very different when the commodity is no longer
considered as an abstract form of capital or as its premise, but as its
immediate product or result. This is the subject of Marx’s investiga-
tion in the Results of the Immediate Process of Production, where he shows
that the re-examination of the commodity as the product of capitalist
production brings new light to the value-determinations. In fact, it is
mainly in that text that we can find Marx’s most explicit and extended
discussion of the central question that concerns us here in order to
solve the “riddle” of the cognitive commodities that puzzles post-
workerist authors: the inner nature of the individual commodity as
component part of a form-determined total product of the process
of capitalist production (Murray, 2009, 165).7
Marx states right at the outset of those manuscripts that, as the
product of capital, the commodity emerges differently from the com-
modity taken as a single product, with which the dialectical exposi-
tion began (Marx, 1976b, 953–4). In this more concrete context,

7 In addition to some in-passing or implicit reflections on this question at different stages of

the presentation (Marx, 1976a, 202), the place in Capital where Marx explicitly addresses
this aspect of the determination of the value-form is the chapter on the “Concept of Relative
Surplus Value” (Marx, 1976a, 433–4). In fact, in Volume III of Capital he cites those pages of
Volume I precisely in order to contrast this inner determination of value with the inverted
form in which it appears in circulation (and hence in the fetishized consciousness of the
individual capitalist), namely that price is fixed for the individual commodity and that the
price of the total product is determined by multiplication (Marx, 1991, 338). But, unlike
in the Results, that question is discussed rather succinctly and does not constitute the focal
point of the presentation.
 cognitive commodities 373

the commodity “changes in form” (Marx, 1976b, 969); it becomes a

“depository of capital that has valorized itself ” (965) and must there-
fore be considered “as the product of a total capital” (971) that embodies
a part of the total surplus-value generated by it. As a consequence,
the determination of the value of the individual commodity can no
longer be considered in isolation but must be directly posited in its
organic relation to the mass of commodities whose unity embodies
the valorization of the capital invested. As Murray perceptively notes
(Murray, 2009, 164), Marx’s shift from singular to plural in his first
contrasting reference to the commodity as premise and product of
capital is far from arbitrary (Marx, 1976b, 949).
In effect, as “the transfiguration of capital that has valorized itself”
(Marx, 1976b, 954), the individual commodity does not simply appear
as an autonomous thing that possesses value inasmuch as it is the result
of a determinate quantity of privately undertaken socially necessary
labor (Marx, 1976b, 969). Instead, it becomes further determined as
the material bearer of the value of the capital advanced (the part of
constant capital transferred during the current production process,
plus the variable component reproduced by living labor), together
with the surplus-value resulting from the exploitation of the (collec-
tive) worker. However, each commodity contains only a fraction of
the total surplus-value generated by the movement of capital. The
latter’s full valorization thus necessarily entails that the commodity
be present and sold “on the scale and in the quantities necessary to
realize the old capital value and the old surplus-value it has created”
(Marx, 1976b, 954). The immanent result of the process no longer
consists in “individual goods,” but in a determinate “mass of com-
modities” that acts as depository of valorized capital and which must
therefore be considered as a single (composite) commodity, i.e., “as a
single use-value . . . whose exchange-value therefore also appears in
the total price as the expression of the total value of this total product”
(Marx, 1976b, 956).
In this more concrete mode of existence, the value of each single
article is determined “by expressing its use-value as an aliquot part of
the aggregate product, and its price as the corresponding aliquot part
of the total value generated by the capital invested” (Marx, 1976b,
957). So, the individual commodity undergoes a transformation from
an average sample of its kind into an aliquot part of the total product of
capital. It becomes not just materially but formally determined as a
374 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

singular element of the total mass of commodities produced by each

individual capital. The relation between the “the parts and the whole”
suffers an inversion vis-à-vis the abstract appearance with which the
exposition started. The value of the aggregate product no longer rep-
resents the simple addition of its constituent elements. Instead, the
total value is determined “first” and then shared out equally by each
individual commodity, which now contains a proportional fraction of
the former (Marx, 1989, 301). At stake here is no longer an extrinsi-
cally connected aggregate of “autonomous” individual commodities,
but a mass of use-values which is given formal unity and consistency
as a single total product that embodies the value of capital plus, above
all, the surplus-value to be realized (Marx, 1989, 301).
In sum, we can now appreciate that the real determination of
value actually transcends the isolated single commodity as such. The
implications of this for the analysis of cognitive commodities follow
quite straightforwardly. Seen in this light, the disproportion between
the enormous “cost of production” of the first original product and
the costless reproduction of subsequent “copies” loses the fantastic
aura that captivates theorists of Cognitive Capitalism and which con-
stitutes one of the pillars of the proclaimed obsolescence of the “law
of labor-value.” Inasmuch as each single commodity embodies an
equal fraction of the value of the product of capital as a whole, the
comparison between the (exceptionally high) cost of production of
the first article and (exceptionally low) cost of reproduction of the
rest is rendered meaningless as far as their value-determinations are
concerned. The alleged contradiction between this aspect of the spe-
cific material “ontology” of cognitive commodities and the value-form
is thus revealed to be a false one. This peculiar aspect of the material-
ity of cognitive commodities leaves the qualitative and quantitative
determinations of the value-form intact.

The Economic Content and Juridical Form

of Cognitive Commodities

Does the previous discussion imply that the phenomenon of “cost-

less reproducibility” of cognitive commodities is entirely irrelevant for
the understanding of contemporary capitalism? Actually, no. Although
this characteristic does not transform the normal “laws” that regulate
the production of value of commodities, this material specificity does
 cognitive commodities 375

impinge on the conditions of appropriation of their use-value and, there-

fore, on the realization of their value. The contemporary prominence
of discussions around intellectual property rights essentially derives from
this peculiarity of cognitive commodities.
In effect, what is distinctive about cognitive commodities, derived
from their so-called costless reproducibility, is that their use-value can
be appropriated as a means of production of further identical use-values
(e.g., subsequent copies of the original software) without virtually any
cost.8 Unlike “physical” commodities, almost no new living labor or
additional costly means of production are involved in, say, copying a
digital file containing software. As we have seen, this does not alter the
determinations of the production of value. But it most certainly does
affect its full realization and therefore gives a specific character to the
juridical form that necessarily mediates it. The latter must not simply
codify the possession of commodities as legal ownership, but also needs
to regulate the conditions of appropriation of their use-value by, for
instance, prohibiting home-copying or sharing of proprietary software,
and more generally, its reproduction, modification, improvement
and redistribution, especially for commercial purposes (this is usually
accompanied by technical barriers to the appropriation of its material
properties through non-accessible source codes). This is necessary
to prevent the appearance of competitors who can produce identi-
cal commodities without the need to incur all the costs involved in
software development (Husson, 2007). These other producers would
otherwise be able to sell their own commodities at a price that stands
below their value due to the exceptional circumstances — namely,
the material properties of cognitive commodities — that allow them
to sell software without needing to expend labor-time in product
development. The producer who did expend that labor-time would
also be forced to sell her commodities at a price that does not reflect
the overall quantity of social labor required to produce software. Here
it is important to emphasize that such a situation would not modify
the value of software, since the labor-time expended in its develop-
ment would not have been rendered superfluous as would happen,
for instance, in the case of a change in the productivity of R&D labor
or of the development of an alternative use-value that rendered the

8 In what follows, I will take the case of software as the paradigmatic example of a cognitive
commodity.
376 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

old software socially useless. In preventing potential situations like

this, intellectual property rights do not force the exchange-value of
software above its insignificantly small (or nonexistent) value (cf. Rul-
lani, 2004), but mediate its full realization. This simplest juridical form
assumed by the realization of the value of cognitive commodities is
already present in their more abstract mode of existence as premises
of capital. But it is obviously further developed in their actual deter-
mination as products of capital, in which case intellectual property
rights essentially become juridical forms taken by the realization of
surplus-value.
The crucial point to highlight is that the juridical form does not
“artificially impose” the (materialized) economic relation (the value-
form), as argued by Cognitive Capitalism theorists. Instead, intellectual
property rights, however necessary, only mediate the realization of the
economic content, whose foundation still rests on the specific social
form taken by the organization of the human metabolic process in
capitalism, i.e., the private and independent form of the production
process of use-values. The “peculiar ontology” of cognitive use-values
does not compromise these simpler determinations of property rights
that Marx unfolds in Chapter 2 of Capital. Like “physical” ones, cogni-
tive “commodities cannot themselves go to the market and perform
exchanges in their own right” (Marx, 1976a, 178) either. As a conse-
quence, the indirect relation between private producers mediated by
knowledge-intensive things, must be itself mediated by a direct relation
between two possessors of commodities who recognize each other as
owners of private property “whose will resides in those objects” (Marx,
1976a, 178). The juridical relation is therefore not simply a direct
relation between free persons (although that is indeed the form in
which it appears and is realized), but one between personifications
of economic categories; more specifically, of the value-form (hence
between unfree, alienated subjects) (Marx, 1976a, 178–9). In other
words, the juridical relation does not only simply mediate the “chang-
ing of hands” of use-values but, fundamentally, gives course to the
realization of the value-form (Marx, 1976a, 179). In this sense, there is
no essential difference between cognitive commodities and “physical”
ones beyond the aforementioned technicality of extending the legal
regulation beyond the act of exchange proper and into the condi-
tions of use. The juridical form of the contract must consequently
 cognitive commodities 377

assume a more complex form. But there is nothing conceptually out

of the ordinary in it which would be signaling that we are witnessing
capital’s desperate attempts to subsume a production of use-values
whose immanent logic “ontologically” already escapes the latter’s
form-determinations.9
This is not the way Cognitive Capitalism theorists conceive of the
economic content and the juridical form of cognitive commodities.
Having first declared that cognitive commodities have no immanent
“economic value” as a consequence of their costless reproducibility,
they also add that, resembling so-called public goods, they are “non-
rival” and “non-excludable” (Moulier-Boutang, 2007, 163).10 Drawing
explicitly upon these unequivocally mainstream notions from marginal-
ist economics of information goods (cf. Varian, 1998), they conclude
that the growing hegemony of cognitive goods therefore undermines
the two foundations on which exchange-value (economic content)
and private property (juridical form) respectively rested: scarcity and
rivalry/excludability (Moulier-Boutang, 2004b, 117–8; Vercellone, 2007,
34). These goods can only be turned into commodities and subjected
to private appropriation “artificially,” through the social creation of

9 Intellectual property rights (IPRs) might be “technically” difficult or costly to enforce, but
these difficulties are far from constituting in its immediacy an absolute contradiction of the
capitalist mode of production, as Cognitive Capitalism theorists tend to put it (Moulier-
Boutang, 2007, 153–82). As Altvater sharply points out, “human ingenuity” (i.e., capital)
“knows no bounds in overcoming the state of non-exclusivity ‘alien to the market economy’
and in assigning exclusive proprietary rights” (Altvater, 2004, 8). This is not to deny that
the specificity of the conditions of appropriation of the use-value of cognitive commodities
does constitute a particular acute manifestation of the contradictory foundations of the
capitalist mode of development of the productive forces of social labor. And this certainly
means that the development and enforcement of IPRs will tend to be done with remarkable
zeal. However, the point is to not to exaggerate their contradictory content by treating them
as an immediate carrier of the absolute limit of the capitalist mode of production. Those
mediating juridical forms of the movement of cognitive commodities do certainly rest on
a peculiarly antagonistic foundation but one that can be resolved (as ever, without being
abolished) within the reproduction of capital itself.
10 Their non-rivalry implies that the use-value of cognitive commodities can be shared without
loss of the available quantity of that use-value. In other words, one person’s consumption
does not diminish the amount available to other people (Varian, 1998, 6). Strictly speaking,
this is not really a feature of these commodities. The alleged non-rivalry is based on the as-
sumption that the real use-value is the knowledge-content, which is seen as an ethereal entity
floating in mid-air, with the material support as a “mere” physical guise (Zuckerfeld, 2009).
But the use-value of a commodity is given by all the material properties in their indissoluble
unity, including both the knowledge-content and the “physical bearer.” Thus, the use-value
of software thus comprises the unity of the digital content and the material support, which
means that the consumption of each copy is rivalrous.
378 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

scarcity by means of “anachronistic” property relations.11 Inasmuch as

the immanent value-determinations no longer operate in the case of
cognitive goods, the juridical form must secure the parasitic imposition
of a “fictitious” economic content (exchange-value), reduced to noth-
ing but an “empty husk” (Vercellone, 2008b). The following passage
by Vercellone summarizes these ideas quite eloquently:

Where the time of labor directly dedicated to the production of commodities

intensive in knowledge becomes insignificant; or, to put it in the language
of neoclassical economic theory, where the marginal costs of reproduction
are practically nothing or extremely low, these commodities should be given
for free. From this standpoint, the solution searched for by capital is now to
advance rights to intellectual property in order to collect monopoly rents.
This stratagem corresponds to a situation which contradicts the very prin-
ciples on which the founding fathers of political economy had theoretically
justified private property and the efficiency of a competitive order. In fact,
it is now the very creation of property which generates scarcity. It is what
Marx (but perhaps even a classical economist like Ricardo) would qualify
as an artificial way of maintaining the primacy of exchange-value (which
is based on the difficulties of production) against wealth, which is based
instead on abundance and use-value, and therefore on free appropriation.
(Vercellone, 2007, 34.)

In other words, the very materiality of cognitive commodities

makes them clash with the general principles of a market order.
According to Moulier-Boutang (Moulier-Boutang, 2007, 160ff) this
“ontological recalcitrance” of cognitive goods vis-à-vis the commodity-
form renders the enforcement of intellectual private property rights
highly difficult and increasingly problematic, making them one of the
major tensions of contemporary capitalism. This in turn explains the
dedicated and concerted global efforts around the imposition of
the “new enclosures” on “intellectual commons” in the last 30 years
or so of capitalist development (Moulier-Boutang, 2004a, 10). It also

11 As Marx notes (1976a, 197), the acquisition of an “imaginary price-form” by things that are
not “in and for themselves” commodities (like conscience, honor, etc.) is a possibility that
is immanent in the commodity-form as the general social relation. These cases do entail a
qualitative contradiction between form and content in which “price ceases altogether to
express value.” Cognitive Capitalism theorists seem to be treating cognitive commodities
as if they were equivalent to those cases of commodification of moral attributes mentioned
by Marx. The problem is that, unlike the latter, the former do have the full content of the
value-determinations.
 cognitive commodities 379

underpins the contemporary significance of struggles against intellec-

tual property rights such as those of the free software movement, seen
as directly embodying a post-capitalist logic of production (Blondeau,
2004, 45–8; Moulier-Boutang, 2007, 134–41). Both the juridical form
and the struggles against it are in this way inflated into the paradig-
matic expressions of what are deemed as absolute contradictions of
the current phase of capitalist development.12
The main problem with this line of reasoning is that despite its
anti-capitalist sentiment and rhetoric, it remains firmly trapped within
the bourgeois horizon of mainstream economics. For even when it
aims to provide weapons for the struggle against the commodity-form,
it too uncritically borrows the conceptual foundations of its practi-
cal critique from the neoclassical theory of the market and property
rights and simply gives them a “radical twist.” Indeed, the validity of
neoclassical arguments for the “necessity” of the value-form (scarcity)
and for the legal regulation of the private appropriation of use-values
(rivalry, excludability) is implicitly accepted for ordinary commodities
and the era of “industrial capitalism.” The problem seems to reside
not so much in those marginalist arguments themselves, but in their
scope of applicability when an increasingly greater part of social wealth
consists of knowledge-intensive commodities, as happens in the age
of Cognitive Capitalism (Moulier-Boutang, 2004a, 117–8). Whereas
ordinary private property is tacitly accepted as an absolute necessity
for the stage of humanity’s history of “struggle against scarcity” in
which “material” commodities were hegemonic (Vercellone, 2008b,
1), intellectual private property has become a historical aberration
that blocks the further development of the productive forces.

12 Some authors go as far as to characterize the production of free software as germinal com-
munism (Ordoñez, et al., 2008, 53). They seem to forget that those free software developers
continue to rely on selling their labor-power as a commodity to reproduce the materiality of
their productive subjectivity. They are wage-laborers and capital continues to be the general
social relation of production through which they produce their life. Under the appearance
of building “spaces of freedom and horizontal democracy” outside the despotic organiza-
tion of production under the command of individual capitals, they are, on the one hand,
further expanding their productive subjectivity with no additional cost for capital, which the
latter then exploits in those workers’ day jobs. On the other hand, they are unconsciously
mediating the competition between individual cognitive capitals and/or acting as an active
force in the imposition of the needs of the reproduction of the total social capital when the
independent actions of particular individual capitals become a barrier to the production of
relative surplus-value (e.g., Microsoft’s attempts at “excessive” monopolistic practices and the
technical unreliability of its operating systems). See Smith, 2009, for a critical assessment of
the limits to the transformative potentialities of commons-based peer production.
380 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

But the point is that the specific material properties of commodi-

ties did not ever constitute the foundation of the value-form and
private property, not even during what Cognitive Capitalism theorists
(wrongly) see as the now defunct age of industrial capitalism. The
products of labor were never commodified because they were “natu-
rally” scarce; their exchange-value was never simply determined by
the “difficulty of production” (i.e., the human overcoming of natural
scarcity); and their private appropriation was never founded on their
“rivalry and excludability.” This fetishistic form and its juridical expres-
sion do not derive from the material characteristics of the product but
from the specific social form in which its production process is organized
(Nuss, 2005). The products of labor take on the value-form because
they have been produced in the form of private and independent
labor. The critique of the commodity-form of cognitive goods based
on the moral denunciation of “artificial scarcity” leaves the attribution
of the form of general exchangeability of “physical” commodities to
“natural” scarcity untouched. In the end, it uncritically falls prey to
the fetishism of the commodity-form of the product of social labor.

Cognitive Means of Production and the Formation of Value

In the first section we followed Marx’s method of presentation

of the simpler determinations of the value-form by treating the total
socially necessary labor for the production of a certain commodity
as an undifferentiated quantity that evidently included, but did not
explicitly distinguish between, past and present labor. Although I did
refer in passing to constant capital when discussing the commodity
as a product of capital, I also tacitly followed Marx’s presentation
in that section of the Results in assuming that its value “was entirely
contained in and had entered into the product of the total capital
under consideration” (Marx, 1976b, 958). We must now drop that
assumption and address the case of means of production whose value
is transferred piece by piece to the finished product. This will allow
us to expand our initial examination of the impact of the “replicable
material ontology” of cognitive commodities in the determination of
the magnitude of value by socially necessary labor-time. Specifically,
it will bring out additional elements that will show that the commod-
ity must necessarily be thought of as part of a total product, and that
therefore the contrast between the value of the first article and that
 cognitive commodities 381

of subsequent identical products is ill-conceived. I will focus again on

the case of software which, in light of the high-intensity of the digital
content of its use-value and the insignificant burden of the material
support, is most expressive of the “replicable material ontology” of
cognitive commodities.
Let us first examine the simpler case of specialist programming
software used for the development of a new application. Here there
seems to be no essential difference with, say, a machine. From the
point of view of the production of the new application, the special-
ized software is the material product of previous labor, which will be
productively consumed in the current labor-process, by appropriating
its use-value to produce a new use-value. Assuming that the specialist
software was bought from another private producer as a commodity,
it will be a bearer of value. However, its contribution to the produc-
tion of a different use-value means that the social usefulness of the
labor materialized in it needs to be re-validated in the new material
shape. Its value will therefore be transferred in the same magnitude
to the finished product as the result of the activity of living labor in its
concrete character. The functional role of programming software in
the labor process becomes form-determined by positing that product
of past cognitive labour as constant capital. And also as happens with
a machine, the useful properties of specialized software as a means
of production are realized over the course of more than one period
of production, which means that its value will be transmitted to the
product fractionally, at a rate determined by the average useful life
during which it acts as an objective factor of the labor-process. It
seems, then, that the “weightlessness” of this peculiar cognitive means
of production brings no essential modification to the process of value
formation.
There is, however, a rather significant difference. Unlike the case
of a machine, software can be said to approximate a condition of
material non-perishability (Zuckerfeld, 2006). The material support
of this cognitive means of production might exhibit wear and tear as
a result of the appropriation of its material properties, but not the
“knowledge-content,” which can be preserved indefinitely as long
as it is given an alternative physical carrier with minimal cost (see,
however, note 10 above). Perhaps the most remarkable characteristic
of software as a means of production is that the rate at which it will
transfer its value to the final product will almost exclusively be determined
382 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

by its moral depreciation (more on this below). Beyond this particularity,

the functioning of this kind of cognitive product as means of produc-
tion resembles that of machines.
With these form-determinations of software as a means of produc-
tion in mind, let us now re-consider the problem of the apparent stark
contrast between the value of the “first unit” of a cognitive commodity
and the “valueless” nature of subsequent copies.
For, strictly speaking, the “first unit” of software is actually the
“prototype,” the original digital file that contains the new application
that has been developed and which will be used to make subsequent
marketable copies.13 The former is the use-value that is the immediate
result of the mostly cognitive socially necessary labor of conception,
design, etc. (briefly put, R&D). As Mandel already noted in the early
1970s, the labor of R&D workers is an unambiguous part of the pro-
ductive labor of the collective laborer, both of use-values and of value
(Mandel, 1975, 255). But its direct result is not the finished product
that eventually takes the commodity-form and is brought to the mar-
ket. The production of the subsequent marketable copies (whether
by stamping out the digital content on blank CDs or by the “virtual”
transmission of a copy of the file through the internet), entails the
production of a use-value which is materially different from the origi-
nal file, and it is in this very final objectified shape that the overall
labor required for its production must still manifest whether it was
expended in a socially useful form or not. From the perspective of the
production of the finished product, the “prototype” represents past
objectified labor. It must therefore not be treated as part of the actual
result of the process of production of software. From the perspective of
the final phase of the collective labor process that produces software
as a commodity, the socially necessary labor of R&D that results in
the prototype produces a means of production and, more concretely, an
instrument of labor (the raw material comprising either the blank CDs on
which the digital file will be stamped out or the electric pulses which
will be given the material form needed for their “virtual” transmission
and reception through the internet).14 Like the case of the making of
earthenware melting-pots by glass manufacturers reported by Marx

13 Strictly speaking, the stable and marketable version of software is usually referred to in the
specialized literature as the “Gold version,” the prototype proper being an earlier version
which might still contain errors or technical problems (Blondeau, 2004, 44).
14 I am indebted to Juan Iñigo Carrera for clarifying this point to me.
 cognitive commodities 383

in Capital, the production of the “means of production is here united

with that of the product” (Marx, 1976a, 465). It is the product of the
separate labor-process of a special organ of the collective laborer as
a whole, whose common final product, made up of the subsequent mass
of marketable copies, becomes a commodity (Marx, 1976a, 475). This
functional determination of the “first unit” in the production process
is usually overlooked by Cognitive Capitalism scholars.
In this sense, it might appear as if the labor of R&D whose partial
product is the prototype should be simply treated as any other partial
activity in any collective labor process. However, from the perspective
of the formation of the value of the product this partial function has
certain peculiarities that make it resemble, but does not actually coin-
cide with, the case of specialized programming software functioning
as constant capital that we discussed just above. In effect, inasmuch
as its potential usefulness is not exhausted in the production of just
one copy of the marketable software but in a mass of them, the labor
contained in the prototype must be considered as socially necessary,
hence as a condition, for the production of that total product. To put
it differently, its use-value is consumed gradually, as it is productively
appropriated by living labor “finally added” in the form of “copying”
over the course of several production processes. However, the similar-
ity with the case of specialized software bought from another private
producer ends here.
In the first place, the prototype does not take the form of value
until it undergoes final transformation into the copy. The material
interdependency between the activity of R&D and that of copying is
not mediated by the commodity-form but is organized directly within
the individual capital that privately commands the respective portion
of social labor. When the prototype is finished, there is still no “value”
to be transferred into the copies (cf. Marx, 1976a, 475).15 Second, in
the case of in-house R&D for the production of a prototype, capital is
not advanced in the form of constant capital only. It is also advanced,
arguably quite intensively, as variable capital, in order to pay the highly
complex intellectual labor-power of software developers (Ordoñez,
et al., 2008).
Here we do encounter a specific feature of cognitive commodities
when looked at from the perspective of the reproduction of variable

15 A point missed by some commentators; e.g., Sander, 2005, 2.

384 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

capital advanced for their highly intensive R&D component. As cor-

responds to the general determination, variable capital is reproduced
through the daily consumption of the use-value of labor-power during
its rather long working period comprising a succession of several inter-
related working days, i.e., of the material realization of its potential for
the expenditure of socially necessary abstract labor through objecti-
fication in the product; in this case, mostly consisting in the workers’
“mental” vital energies. Given the continuous nature of the R&D labor
process stretching over a long working period, the objectification of
labor-power that reproduces variable capital is only realized in “layers”
of labor that are successively “deposited” on an unfinished product
until giving the latter its final shape of the replicable prototype.16
However, the reproduction of R&D variable capital is not yet fully
realized, as happens in the simpler case, with its objectification in
the product of the continuous labor-process of which it is the direct
result. Instead, variable capital actually reappears in the product of the
subsequent “copying” labor-process with which the production process
of this “cognitive instrument of labor” is united. More importantly,
the variable capital advanced for the production of the prototype is
reproduced over the course of a series of final labor-processes that yield
the total mass of marketable copies of software that will eventually take
the commodity-form. As part of the valorization process, the abstract
character of R&D labor objectified in the prototype must therefore be
treated as if entering piece by piece into the process of value formation
of the final product. Thus, the value of variable capital advanced in
this specific form re-appears in the value of the finished commodity
in a manner which is, typically, that of constant capital. Seen from the
perspective of the turnover of capital, the portions that are advanced
to buy R&D labor-power appear at first sight to start its circuit in a
manner that corresponds to the form-determinations of its circulat-
ing part (Marx, 1978, 245). However, its actual nature is eventually
revealed when looked at from the point of view of the completion of
their turnover circuit, which determines this part of variable capital
as fixed capital (Iñigo Carrera, 1998, 44).
These further determinations of the process of value formation
for cognitive commodities such as software allow us to concretize the

16 Marx discusses the notion of working period and the peculiarities of continuous labor
processes in Volume II of Capital (Marx, 1978, 306ff).
 cognitive commodities 385

quantitative determination of the volume of the mass of commodities

that must be considered as the materialization of the socially neces-
sary labor for its production. Once we make the distinction between
past and present labor explicit, this mass of commodities acquires an
immanent diachronic dimension: the software “prototype” maintains
its role in the formation of value as long as it remains socially useful,
i.e., indirectly satisfies a social need by acting as a means of produc-
tion of additional copies. Given its specific “non-perishable” character,
the social usefulness of the software prototype has the peculiarity of
being subject to virtually no material limit springing from its physical
deterioration. Unlike the case of “hardware,” the relevant volume of
commodities is almost purely determined by the “moral” useful life of
the software prototype. The latter is given by the existence of a social
need for the finished marketable product (the “copies”), which in
turn usually depends on whether those products have been displaced
by similar ones (Marx, 1976a, 201).17
Be that as it may, the essential point is that the individual value
of each copy is determined as an aliquot part of the total value that
represents the materialization of the overall socially necessary labor
for the production of a synchronically and diachronically–specified mass
of cognitive commodities. This additional determination of the value
of individual commodities thus throws the validity of claims about the
alleged obsolescence of the law of value brought about by the nature
of cognitive commodities into further question. The differentiation
between an expensive first “unit” and valueless subsequent copies is
rendered even more spurious. In fact, this organic determination of
the individual commodity as a constituent element of a larger mass
17 With the acceleration of technological change in the current phase of capitalist development,
individual capitals now tend to plan the moral obsolescence of their own commodities, thus
deliberately shortening their useful life by inducing the creation of a new social need that
displaces the old one. (Needless to say, individual capitals cannot fully control the pace of
moral obsolescence. As ever, they are still exposed to unexpected capital devaluation caused
by the action of competitors.) These processes therefore delimit more strictly the time ho-
rizon for the diachronic determination of the relevant mass of commodities in accordance
with these ever-shorter product life-cycles. In the example of software above, the relevant
period for the role of the prototype in the formation of the value of the copies is therefore
that of its (planned) product life-cycle (or, seen from the viewpoint of the overall circulation
of capital, that would be the relevant turnover period). This is further compounded in the
case of newer versions of fundamentally similar commodities or of closely related families
of products; some of the original R&D labor will enter the formation of value of subsequent
generations, or concurrent variations, of the same product. The relevant turnover period
(or synchronic scope of action of R&D labor in the determination of the value of the diverse
elements of a family of products) will be extended (or broadened) accordingly.
386 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

does not even derive from its more concrete mode of existence as a
product of capital, discussed earlier. It simply derives from the material
specificities of the software prototype as an instrument of production
(i.e., as past labor), and the ways in which they make it participate in
the formation of the value of the finished article. It is therefore an even
simpler determination which, abstractly considered, already pertains
to the value of commodities simply constituting the reified represen-
tation of the socially necessary labor for their production, regardless
of their condition as depositories of valorized value. In reality, we can
appreciate now that already at that higher level of abstraction each
single article acts as a formally identical embodiment of an aliquot
part of the overall socially necessary abstract labor required for the
production of a determinate mass of commodities.18

Concluding Remarks

This paper has offered a critique of some of the central theses of

the Cognitive Capitalism approach that underpin the claims about
the crisis of the law of value, focusing on certain aspects that have
remained unexplored in the critical literature. We have examined
the alleged impact of the peculiar nature of cognitive commodi-
ties upon the determinations of the value-form. As we have seen,
none of these allegedly novel features of contemporary capitalism
compromise the law of value and its rule over the organization of
social life. The value-form in the unity of all of its qualitative and
quantitative determinations is still alive and kicking as the alienated
general social form in which human productive subjectivity repro-
duces and develops in the capitalist mode of production. We have
demonstrated this not only by pointing to the flaws in the arguments
of Cognitive Capitalism theorists, but also by positively unfolding an
alternative explanation of those phenomena that seem to clash with
the Marxian law of value, on the basis of this law itself. As should be
obvious from our discussion, nothing too mysterious was at stake
which could not be elucidated through the unfolding of the specific
categories and method of the Marxian critique of political economy
as developed in Capital.

18 However, as stated above, in this paper we have followed Marx in postponing the presentation
of this determination until reaching the level of the capital-form.
 cognitive commodities 387

This raises the question: Why do these authors, who otherwise

see themselves as continuing Marx’s revolutionary intellectual legacy,
too easily declare the whole edifice of the critique of political econ-
omy obsolete (with the exception, of course, of the “Fragment on
Machines”), and draw inspiration from a series of notions borrowed
from the most varied strands of bourgeois thought? Husson quite
sharply notes that this approach and its resulting eclecticism express
a strategy consisting in attempting to be innovative and modern at any
cost (Husson, 2003). All theoretical tools which one way or another
lend support to the claims to novelty are embraced and deployed,
while attempts to use categories from the past are rejected out of hand
and deemed dogmatic or anachronistic. Armed with such an eclectic
theoretical arsenal, a spurious novel “totality” is then constructed on
the basis of a laundry list of commonplaces and myths about alleged
new features of contemporary social reality uncritically taken from
mainstream social sciences (cf. the 15 “markers” of Cognitive Capital-
ism in Moulier-Boutang, 2007). In this context, the Marxian critique of
political economy is portrayed as a creature of its time (i.e., industrial
capitalism), which is almost by definition incapable of shedding light
on the qualitative transformations that the present “cognitive” phase
of capitalism entails.
This attitude reflects a more general trend on the left and is far
from being abstractly intellectual. As Bonefeld aptly put it in the late
1990s, this intellectual posture is expressive of a specific politics that
he appropriately labelled the politics of novelty, which “amounts to
the Left’s abdication of negative critique in favor of new and newer
concepts . . . based on the theoretical tradition of positivism” (Bone-
feld, 1998). Critical social theory is thus reduced to a variation on
the common themes developed by mainstream scholars, albeit with
the extrinsic addition of a revolutionary rhetoric aimed at fostering
progressive social change. But in order to be able to turn into practical
criticism, the scientific critique of the capital-form must go beyond the
one-sided empirical descriptions and fetishistic categories of contem-
porary vulgar economics. Otherwise, and despite its laudable progres-
sive intentions, it cannot but become trapped within the ideological
forms taken by contemporary modalities of exploitation; a risk which,
as some commentators have perceptively noted, has become the real-
ity of much recent post-workerist theorizing (Bellofiore and Tomba,
2008; Henninger, 2007).
388 SCIENCE & SOCIETY

There is no doubt that capitalism has changed and that those

transformations have their essence in the mutations of the productive
subjectivity of the working class. This should come as no surprise since
it is precisely in the revolutionary nature of large-scale industry to
“continuously transform the worker and the social combinations of the
labor-process” (Marx, 1976a, 617). Moreover, these transformations
most certainly involve an expansion of the knowledge-dimension of
the productive subjectivity of the collective laborer as a whole (albeit
unevenly among its different partial organs), which in turn takes con-
crete form through the increased cognitive-content of the use-values
that act as material bearers of the value-form. In this sense, there is a
rational kernel in the post-workerist emphasis on the role of knowl-
edge in the production process as capital develops and as the neces-
sary basis for its revolutionary transcendence. Despite all the flaws
in the Cognitive Capitalism approach, these post-workerist scholars
have at least the merit of trying to connect the political subjectivity
of workers with the transformations of their productive subjectiv-
ity, i.e., their capacity consciously to organize the production of the
materiality of human life (Iñigo Carrera, 2008). Cognitive capitalism
theorists are also right to point to the passages on machines from the
Grundrisse as a key text where Marx more explicitly (albeit far from
systematically) developed the transformation of the intellectual powers
of the process of production into attributes of the collective labourer
(Starosta, 2011). The problem lies, however, in the idiosyncratic way
in which they conceptualize the role of knowledge in contemporary
capitalism, in turn based on a problematic reading of those sections
of the Grundrisse.
More specifically, these scholars unmediatedly (hence specula-
tively) apply what Marx discussed as the essential content and finished
form of the development of workers’ productive subjectivity under the
rule of the capital-form — i.e., the movement of “bourgeois society in
the long view and as a whole” (Marx, 1973, 712) — onto contemporary
concrete forms of realization that still represent its negation. But over
the course of capitalist development, that essential determination and
general tendency underlying the revolutionary mode of existence of
productive subjectivity unfolds in the form of its self-negation: its required
universality is realized through the reproduction of ossified particularities
and the expansion of its intellectual and scientific productive attributes
is realized in the necessary mode of the degradation of others (both
 cognitive commodities 389

intellectual and manual).19 Moreover, this two-fold contradictory

movement of the productive subjectivity of the collective laborer is
manifested (hence experienced) differently in the individuality of
each of its diverse organs, which tends to reinforce the political frag-
mentation of their objective general determination as a class.
In other words, the constitution of the capital-transcending form
of productive subjectivity is historically produced as the result of a
development that keeps the productive attributes of wage-workers
miserably bound to being those required by the material forms of the
reproduction of relative surplus-value (even when they are expanded
as in the case of intellectual laborers performing the most complex
productive functions of scientific research).20 But even an impression-
istic glance at the current “technical composition of the working class”
suffices to reveal that the materiality of its productive subjectivity is far
from immediately expressing the fully developed universal individual,
for whom life-activity constitutes “the appropriation of his own general
productive power, his understanding of nature and his mastery over
it by virtue of his presence as a social body” (Marx, 1973, 712, 705).
From the latter perspective, which represents the ultimate result of
the “system of bourgeois economy” and personifies its revolutionary
negation, the contemporary “knowledge-economy” might as well be
said to look more like an economy of general ignorance.
Departamento de Economía y Administración
Universidad Nacional de Quilmes
Roque Sáenz Peña 352
Bernal - B1876BXD
Buenos Aires, Argentina
gstarosta@unq.edu.ar

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